When I was a little girl, my dad used to take my brother and I camping in the Appalachian Mountains. We lived in West Virginia in those days. It was a wild state and beautiful country full of narrow winding back roads. No one really knew those country roads as well as my father. Or at least, it seemed that way to me. Dad worked as a lawyer for Alleghany Land & Mineral. I think he had a pretty tight relationship with his boss and the job afforded him time to travel those mountain roads to survey the companies land holdings. I don’t recall too many specifics because I was just a wee one no older than 7 or 8 years. But I remember the camping and road trips featured time with dad to an advantage. I felt like he was in his element in those mountains and it was a pleasure for him to watch us discover. We didn’t do to often but those memories stand out as being a very important part of my formative years. It was those experiences that established my relationship with nature.
Dad’s way of camping was different than camping with most fathers. He used to have us participate in this kind of survivalist camping. We didn’t bring a tent, instead we would string a military poncho between 4 trees and sleep under it – we were still basically camping in the open air. We didn’t bring proper cookware. My brother and I would have to go down to river and find thin pieces of slate wedged in the river bed that we could use instead of pans; grey slate for my brother and I, black slate for my dad (he preferred his food a little burnt). After accomplishing that task, we were sent into the forest and to dig a 3ft deep hole that would serve as our private family latrine. When we had finished the latrine, we were released of our duties and set free to play in the land that we had just been intimately acquainted with during these tasks. I remember the scent of the forest on those mountains. The air was potent with musk of the moist, black soil intermingling with smells springtime baby leaves, moss and ramps. Everything seemed so fresh and alive. This was the camping ritual, always the same.
On one of these trips Dad took us to introduce to a mountainy woman (basically a homeless woman) who he and his boss discovered living under a tree with her goat while surveying land holdings. Since Alleghany Land & Mineral had no plans to use that parcel in the immediate future, my father and his boss decided to build the woman, who they affectionately called Goat Mary, a very basic structure that could offer a little more shelter from the elements.
Goat Mary was a bit crazy and had a reputation for harassing nearby campers until they gave her some food. In an effort to avoid her heckles during our camping trip, Dad brought Goat Mary a bag full of groceries. My brother and I knew we were going camping, but dad surprised us both with this first stop. We had never met or heard of Goat Mary, so meeting this wild woman living in her shack in the wilderness bewildered us. She was unlike anyone you would see in town, and I was simultaneously fascinated by and terrified of her. Her clothes were tattered, her hair unruly and her whole carriage and demeanor was a little bit grizzly. Despite her unsightly appearance, it was easy for me to romantically relate Goat Mary to the old crones in the fairy tales I had been reading all my life.
Her little structure was also unlike anything I was used to seeing in town. In fact, it seemed to be a refuge from a world that was a little too fast for her. Decorative objects that she found, inherited or stole had been lovingly arranged to shroud the poverty. The subterfuge was somewhat successful but the strange context of the objects she selected read a little like witchcraft, which further enhanced the previously mentioned romantic link to Fairy Tales. In retrospect, there is a good chance that I was more afraid of her than she was of me.
Our visit was brief lasting less than an hour total. I am convinced that Goat Mary forgot me almost immediately after our visit as I was just a little girl and she seemed quite distracted by my dad and took advantage of the opportunity to flirt with him. But I never forgot her. There was something about her that embodied all the best and worst aspects of absolute freedom. She occupied a potent but narrow corridor that divides wilderness and civilization. Goat Mary became a lens through which I sometimes view the world. If I could funnel all my fears through her, they somehow became more manageable and I less accountable for my preoccupation with them. So her perspective is now my perspective, a gift that became my burden on that fateful day in the bosom of Appalachia.